Mountains, Stars, and Myself

This work is intended to tactile carving out a landscape as a visual image as a sculpture.

Vision and touch are integrated, and faces are engraved on blocks of wood while re-touching memories using photographs of the landscape. With this, they tried to achieve a stronger presence unique to the medium called sculpture.

I sculpted the scene of the Alps blending into the dusk, seen two days after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. That's because I felt the strong sculptural power of those mountains. Relying on photographs and memories of actual landscapes, they engraved tactile perspective and surfaces into blocks of wood.

The rice fields, private houses, mountain surface, and sky are carved from below the work, yet integrated.

Trees are embedded in the mountain surface to emphasize the visual/tactile volume.

The overall form of the work and the shape of clouds or figures in the sky are quotes from Cezanne's “Big Bathing Map.”

Also, the “waves” and “Milky Way,” which are on the other side of the mountain, are modeled on the reverse side.

The ever-changing climate of Japan and our feelings. The appearance of mountains that exist and do not change their shape as if contrary to that. However, I wanted to express the reality that even that is actually fluctuating.